Fernando Polack, with Levy Yeyati: “We did not have the early Pfizer vaccine due to a series of errors”

“Science is the growth of peoples”, sentence Fernando Polack. Pediatrician, infectologist and promoter of the research carried out in Argentina on plasma treatments against Covid-19 and responsible for the Initial Pfizer Vaccine StudiesPolack talks in depth with the economist Eduardo Levy Yeyati in the first installment of the cycle of interviews “think differently”.

This is the first of a series of meetings that Levy Yeyati will hold with academics, social or cultural leaders. They can be seen every Thursday afternoon on the site of TN and on our YouTube channel.

-There is a natural question I want to ask you. The vaccine, obviously, was Pfizer and it was indeed tested here and elsewhere. I want you to tell me a little about that, but apart from that, tell me as far as you can, why was it late if we started so early?

-We didn’t have Pfizer so early, for me, a series of errors, many assumptions. I was very sorry because we played very hard for the vaccine to be administered in Argentina when it was beginning to be administered in other countries.

– Was there a quota?

-There was, yes. That is public. I think it would have been much better. Clearly, when we started, no one knew how far this situation could go, but unfortunately we did not have Pfizer. I think there was an idea that all vaccines were going to work quickly and easily, and what happened in COVID-19 was a miracle, and that is that even the bad vaccines would eventually work, whereas normally what happens in the workplace is that none of them work… so, if one had to bet on what was going to happen from the knowledge side, the answer was that nothing was going to work.

-On the other hand, you didn’t have to diversify the bet…

-Diversify, fill the board, you have to put a chip on each number of the roulette because it’s still cheap. Even if you lose all 35 chips and win with one. That was the mistake, it seems to me, that there certainly was: a poor understanding of the party that was on the table at the time.. Seeing it from where I saw it… but I was in one of the vaccine safety commissions, at the American, European level, I was everywhere. I knew that you had to play everything, I knew that you had to be aggressive in everything.

-In fact, it’s what they were doing in other countries too, right? There were many who had overbought…

-Yes, the most developed countries. All the small countries had made the Argentine mistake in some way. They found that they had only a small shipment from Pfizer and a Chinese second-line vaccine or they had a little bit of a Chinese vaccine and [estaban] pawing to see what would appear. Well, for example, Bolsonaro, who had sent the nonsense that was sent… Not the big countries. But we, out there leveraged where we stood, we could make a little bit of a big country, that was the mistake.

The leading role in the pandemic

– How did public exposure hit you? You took on a visibility that was unusual for you, at least as far as I was following you. Would you do it again? Did it burn you? How did you experience it?

-In general, it happens to me that when I have an initiative I am much better at doing it than at measuring the consequences of where I am going to end up when I do things. So sometimes I turn around and I’m 200 meters from the shore and I say: How the hell do I get there? How did I start this? For enthusiasm. We are going to have a treatment, the plasma. We’re going to have a vaccine, Pfizer. Let’s fix this problem.

Then you realize that you’re in a situation where the US government is concerned about the vaccine studies, where the company is obviously super-intensely involved and concerned that everything is done the right way and well. But also very worried because she couldn’t come to Argentina.

Yes, I was a mess. What about the Pfizer study? If there was a quarantine and Pfizer couldn’t come to work here. They were actually much more invested in our expertise than they normally would have been in a normal situation. There was all the political attention that there was in Argentina, around all this controversy, where I did not participate, but I saw it constantly, and sometimes I even heard someone who named me.

And there was all my responsibility, which is much more important to me, which is how the patients were going to fare, how the volunteers were going to fare. If they had a fever, if they felt fine, if they were contained. 5,700 people, 26 times more than the average for a North American site. We had 26 times more people who came out perfect in the study than the average center from Columbia, or Harvard or Stanford, for example.

So I had a lot of things open, beyond my individual responsibility, which was to guide 1,200 people, which is my team, to carry out the work. I got Covid twice. Gonzalo Pérez Marc, for example, also had one time, and several more than those who make up our team. We were exposed to death, let’s not fuck around, there was no vaccine, there was nothing. It was a completely abnormal situation.

The other day I was talking to a neurologist and he told me about two levels of care. A casual level of attention, which is how you and I are chatting. And the other is that a person with a gun walks through the door, so you and I already measure everything we do and we don’t make mistakes, because we know that life depends on each movement we make. Well, a little bit I lived a whole year like this, knowing that each movement of mine had a level of risk, an infinite level of exposure.

in what is my public exhibition, it was interesting. I would tell you that it is also to know that I don’t want to do it, that it is not something that interests me. What happens is that Pfizer has a philosophy that seems very attractive to me, and that is that we work, we do not report our work. That premise governed my entire team and therefore governed all the progress here. That’s why you didn’t see me anymore. I dedicated myself to the success of this study, to the care of the volunteers, to the evaluation of the vaccine. It’s not that I get rich if the vaccine works.

-Your job was to test it…

-Exactly, but test it so you can know if it works. Because it was very important to know it well. So that’s what got me out of the way. When I got out of that and dedicated myself purely to work, I felt an immense relief. Then I realized that my thing was to work.

Every foundation is the reflection of a failure

-You created a foundation in 2003. What was the plan? Especially considering what is said about the need to have more science and technology, more income, more researchers, more links, etc. You are a successful case. There are two natural questions. One is: how did you plan it? And the other is: why aren’t there more foundations like yours? From your experience, what is that course like?

-My foundation is a reflection, as are all foundations in developing countries, of the State’s failure to have a public policy that ensures that no one has to have a foundation.

– Is it the private substitute for the failure of the State as producers of science and technology institutions? The failure of the university, perhaps? Because the State and the university are not the same, in Argentina at least.

-I believe that Argentina has several things there. At the university, being so large, it has a product, an output, from a group of people of the highest intellectual level. For example, a career as medicine at the UBA. You put a thousand types and well, you get an incredible thousand. That they are very hungry, that they want to learn, that they want to progress, that if you manage to capture them to work with you, if you manage to attract them to your project, it is very difficult to have that elsewhere. At Harvard, for example, you have to distribute among 300 thousand people. Because people have a lot of different interests when they come to the big institutions in the United States.

Here is a hunger for knowledge. There is a much greater limit of opportunities than there is in the large American or European institutions. There is a limit of scholarships, there is a limit of training capacity. There is a genuine attempt, I think -we have seen it sometimes even together-, to have a science framework, there are many valuable people, there are very good guys. But there is no global vision of how Argentina has to insert itself in that, as there is not, not in all countries, but in most. Brazil has it, or Brazil had it a lot in the previous government. Chile has it.

Argentina always had a limitation there. For example, Argentina should have a much more aggressive exchange policy. You told me, for example: why don’t you bring a group of guys to tell you if the vaccine works or not? Well, it seems obvious to you, but it was never obvious to Argentina in any administration. I think there is a huge area there. Argentina needs a policy of hierarchizing a group of guys who act as an idea of ​​a spirit of the times. Ten guys who understand a subject. They can be six Argentines, three Brazilians. Because, who is going to come to live in Argentina?

Where would you put the money if you had to choose?

-I would put it in maternal and child health, I could put it in Chagas, I would put it in infant mortality. Those are the first things in which I would put money, because they are the ones I know. I am sure that, suddenly, there must be known oncological pathologies in Argentina, hemolytic uremic syndrome… From my area I have three or four things, which are not all the ones that I work on, in which I would put the money. But to change the situation, not to describe it, not to do what other countries do and say that we did it here too, but to innovate, generate knowledge and change the situation.

There you have to put money, you have to put a commitment of years, that does not happen in 15 days. In addition, we must begin to create a very fruitful avenue of exchange with the central countries where people go and return. Not go back and forth for 15 days, but go back and forth for years. Because The other myth of Argentina is that if you go abroad for a month, you were not abroad. So you can have an enormously talented guy, a phenomenon in Argentina, that you send him to a meeting with the Queen of England, and in the middle of the meeting he drops a piece of paper and you see that the guy when he turns around to pick it up , upsets the Queen of England, and at that moment the interview was over and everything was over. That Argentina does without stopping.

There are a lot of codes of good manners and conduct that science is full of, I’m sure economics and politics too… but I know it in science. And these are really a necessary condition, not the only one, but a necessary condition, so that things can get on track. Because science is the growth of peoples, a scientifically fertile country, educationally it is a much better country, there is no doubt about that and we all agree. So for me that is a construction to do.

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